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Security Basics: The Simplest Way to Keep Your Systems Secure

Article By | | Technology Consulting

We all see the notifications, and many are inclined to ignore them. But installing Windows Updates as they become available is one of the very first steps to ensuring your systems are as secure as they can be.

For quite some time now, Microsoft has performed security and feature updates for Windows 10 on a monthly basis. Installing these updates has become so streamlined that no second thought is needed for getting them installed. But what do these updates actually do?

This month’s update, for example, was released on the 11th. A notable fix in this update is for a recently discovered exploit that could allow a malicious user to gain administrator access. Such access would allow them to perform numerous attacks on the machine.

While it does sound like such an exploit should be getting great deals of exposure, discoveries like these are often made, but thankfully just as often patched. Microsoft assesses the exploitability of all such vulnerabilities and prioritises resolving them accordingly.

In addition to security fixes for Windows, updates also resolve vulnerabilities with other Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Office, as well as 3rd party software like Adobe Flash Player.

Monthly security updates follow a release schedule of the second Tuesday of the month. Urgent security updates (such as in response to the WannaCry outbreak of 2017) are deployed outside of this schedule, as a means to remove vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered, or widely exploited.

For business environments, systems are available that allow updates to be centralised and deployed in a very unobtrusive manner. If you’d like to explore your options in deploying such a system for your business, please contact the Innovations Team for a review of suitable update deployment systems.